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Saturday, September 2, 2017

Footprint find on Crete may push back date humans began to walk upright

HUMAN-like
footprints have been found on an ancient sea shore. They shouldn’t be
there. They’re in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Jamie Seidel

News Corp Australia Network

September 2, 20178:27am

These
footprints, found at Trachilos in western Crete, have been attributed
to an ancient human ancestor that walked upright some 5.7 million years
ago. Credit: Andrzej Boczarowski

HUMAN-like footprints have been found stamped into an ancient sea shore fossilised beneath the Mediterranean island of Crete.They shouldn’t be there.Testing puts the rock’s age at 5.7 million years.That’s a time when palaeontologists believe our human ancestors had only apelike feet.And they lived in Africa.But a study into the Trachilos, western Crete, prints determines them to feature prominent human features and an upright stance.And that’s significant as the human foot has a unique shape. It combines a long sole, five short toes, no claws — and a big toe.In comparison, the foot of a Great Ape look much more like a human hand.And that step in evolution wasn’t believed to have taken place until some 4 million years ago.

Published in the latest edition of Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, the study’s conclusions are bound to raise eyebrows in the human evolution community.“The interpretation of these footprints is potentially controversial,” the study’s abstract admits.“The
print morphology suggests that the trackmaker was a basal member of the
clade Hominini (human ancestral tree), but as Crete is some distance
outside the known geographical range of pre-Pleistocene (2.5 million to
11,700 years ago) hominins we must also entertain the possibility that
they represent a hitherto unknown late Miocene primate that convergently
evolved human-like foot anatomy.”Put simply, the study argues
there was another — previously unidentified — human-like creature
walking the Earth long before we believed it was possible.

A
reconstruction of the skeleton of Australopithecus sediba, centre, next
to a small-bodied modern human female, left, and a male chimpanzee.
Picture: APSource:AP

The
existing pool of evidence into humanity’s origins is built around
Australopithecus fossils found in south and East Africa, along with a
3.7 million-year-old set of upright hominin (human ancestor) footprints
found in Tanzania.Called
the Laetoli footprints, these are believed to have been made by
Australopithecus with a narrow heel and poorly defined arch.In
contrast, a set of 4.4 million-year-old prints found in Ethiopia are
believed from the hominin Ardipithecus ramidus. These prints are much
closer to that of an ape than a modern human.But the Trachilos footprints, at 5.7 million years, appear to be more human than Ardipithecus.

They
were found by the study’s lead author, Gerard Gierlinski, while he was
holidaying on the island of Crete in 2002. The palaeontologist at the
Polish Geological Institute has taken more than a decade to analyse his
find.The Trachilos prints have a big toe very similar to our own
in size, shape and position. It has a distinct ball on its sole. It has
the human-like sole. It doesn’t have claws.They were pressed into
the firm but wet sands of a small river delta at a time when the Sahara
was lush and green, and savanna extended from North Africa around the
Eastern Mediterranean. Crete itself was still part of the Greek mainland
then.

The
three most well-preserved footprints, each shown as a photo (left),
laser surface scan (middle) and scan with interpretation (right). a was
made by a left foot, b and c by right feet. Scale bars, 5cm. 1—5 denote
digit number; ba, ball imprint; he, heel imprint. Pictures: Gerard D.
Gierliński et al / ElsevierSource:Supplied

They
have been dated using foraminifera (analysis of marine microfossils) as
well as their position beneath a distinctive sedimentary rock layer
created when the Mediterranean Sea dried up about 5.6 million years ago.The
footprints’ discovery also comes shortly after the fragmentary fossils
of a 7.2 million-year-old primate Graecopithecus, discovered in Greece
and Bulgaria, were reclassified as belonging to the human ancestral
tree.

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